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- Arsenal are allegedly the dirtiest team in the Premier League. So what do the figures say?
By Tony Attwood
According to an article in Sports Mole today, Arsenal have a dozen players who are now likely or certain to miss the League Cup game against Southampton on 4 April. And just pondering that article, it came to me that although I have seen Arsenal injury lists get quite enlarged before, I don’t think I have actually seen a list of a dozen players, each of whom might have expected to be either playing or at the very least on the bench, being ruled out for injury.
The list, of course, means that the game in the League Cup quarter finals will be Southampton v Arsenal Reserves, and so will be a measure of Arsenal’s back-up qualities.
But it comes at a time when Southampton have just gone 14 games in the league and FA Cup without defeat, so this one against members of Arsenal’s second and third team squads is looking easier for them by the day.
I’ll take a more in-depth look shortly, but one can only hope that at some stage Arsenal’s management does wake up to the fact that allowing players to go off for internationals whenever called up most certainly does not reward those supporters who loyally pay to come to games.
Elsewhere in the last couple of days, Chelsea has confirmed what we already knew – that they made an all-time British record loss in their last set of accounts. That, of course, won’t worry them because they know they can pull all the tricks in all the books to avoid having any kickback from the authorities, and so they move forward secure in the knowledge that whatever scheme they come up with next to avoid the rules, the league will run along behind them, shutting doors with bolted horses far off in the distance.
One of Chelsea’s prime forms of expenditure is agent fees, and I would suspect that even now they have a committee sitting down and working out how they can beat the financial regulations in this regard next time around, as they did this time by selling off their women’s team to their own subsidiary company. (How could any organisation draw up a set of rules with such a huge gap lurking within it?) And besides, although the club don’t seem likely to claim a trophy this season, they might well be expecting a trophy for the highest pre-tax loss ever recorded by an English club. The previous record holder was of course, Manchester City.
Of course, another thing that could be done by the authorities would be to bring the English League’s reporting methods in line with those of the rest of Europe. But given that Uefa’s recent report showed that Chelsea’s losses in 2025 were even higher, but then reduced through using the League’s own way of counting, that gap remains open for others to use in future.
But on one thing everyone agreed: Chelsea spent £65.1m on agents’ fees, almost double the second-highest spending club in this regard. But not too many journalists seem to mind or even mention this.
Anyway, now most of the razzamatazz of the pre-world cup friendlies has gone and we are left with the thought that actually there wasn’t any razzamatazz in the first place, and come to that, very little football to get excited about.
But I am sure the journalists and their paymasters will get very excited about the forthcoming WC finals in North America, and by and large forget to tell us anything about the price of admission, or the way the authorities are dealing with supporters.
Yet there is still a chance that one or two of Arsenal’s injured players might recover enough by Saturday evening to be able to turn out for the FA Cup match against Southampton. And here we might note that since 26 January, Southampton has played a dozen games, and many of their players have had no international call-ups. In the same period, Arsenal have played 15 games and most of their first team squad have also been flying around the world playing for their countries of origin, or at least their adopted countries.
In those two terms at it rather looks as if the odds must be with Southampton, which means Arsenal might well have to be working doubly hard to come through this particular FA Cup tie.
